Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries)

by James W. Hall

  Reaching a hand to the window, Claude knuckle-rapped the glass, and a few seconds later the curtain swept aside and a guy’s bleary face appeared. Claude gave the kid a two-finger come-here wave, and the curtains fell closed.

  A half minute later the front door of the Bendell house creaked open, then slammed. Claude stood waiting by the ladder until Marcus Bendell showed—a skinny kid in his late twenties with sneaky eyes and a ponytail down his back.

  On Marcus’s throat was some kind of hostile tattoo. Prison art. An arrow with its sharpened tip buried in the kid’s Adam’s apple, five or six drops of blood trailing from the inked-on wound. Claude hadn’t seen one of those before. He didn’t keep up with all the hip-hop and gang bullshit, or whatever the tattoo was connected to. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about the complaints of turd balls like Bendell.

  Bendell saw Claude standing beside the aluminum ladder and halted. A wooden club was in his right hand, like a miniature bowling pin, the kind of homemade weapon people who couldn’t afford guns kept near their beds. The guy was a half foot taller than Claude, but had a spindly look, a pale cast to his skin, and teeth the dull gray of fish scales. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. Far as Claude was concerned, the long hair, that tattoo, the way the kid was sneering, made what he was about to do totally guilt-free.

  “What the fuck, man?”

  “I might ask you the same.”

  “Six in the morning, trespassing in my yard, you got a warrant?”

  “Phone company doesn’t need warrants. We own these materials. This is our right of way.”

  “My landline’s working fine.”

  “Your neighbor’s isn’t.”

  “Which neighbor?”

  “Tell me something, Marcus. How much that hookup cost you? Two hundred bucks? One-fifty?”

  “What hookup?”

  “Oh, come on, kid. You’re a bright boy. You know damn well you’re diverting current back here. I’m curious how much it cost you.”

  “What do you care?”

  “Well, whatever you paid, you got screwed. There’s something you got to look at, how this thing is rigged. I’d hate to see someone get fried from this half-assed workmanship. Even an obvious asshole like yourself.”

  “Man, what the fuck is pushing your crazy button?” Marcus’s eyes hardened and he took a better grip on the club.

  “It’s not my specialty, but I hear electricity thieves like you cost your fellow citizens around two billion dollars a year.”

  “Power company is the thief.”

  “Florida statutes call it larceny with relation to utility fixtures. You’re found guilty in a civil action, you’re liable to an amount equal to three times the cost of services unlawfully obtained. Jail time, years of probation. The state’s on their side, not yours.”

  “They usually are.”

  “But a guy like you, long hair and the pissed-off tattoo, you’re not stealing power to save a buck. It’s politics with you, right? Overthrow the lords and masters.”

  Marcus stared at the ladder. “If you’re from the phone company, let me see some ID.”

  “Look, son, bottom line, I’m not crazy about what you’re doing, but I’m not legally required to report this. So this can just stay between you and me. Man-to-man.”

  Bendell looked out toward the street, then up into the branches. He shifted the club to his other hand.

  Claude said, “Fact is, I don’t give two squirts of piss if you’re stealing power from the man or any of that happy-hippie horseshit. But here I am out in the field doing my job, and I’d say fuck it and walk off, except in your case, after I had a look-see, I found that you, Mr. Bendell, got yourself a serious issue with this connection. Whoever did this for you, they didn’t know shit about electricity. There’s some criminal negligence at work. If I were you, I wouldn’t lie down in bed again till you consider the fire hazard lurking outside your bedroom.”

  “You want money, is that it? A bribe not to turn me in.”

  “You’re not hearing me, pal. I got higher interests than cash. I’m a fully functioning human with morals and empathy and the whole deal. I don’t like seeing my fellow man turning into charcoal from somebody’s poor tradecraft. Go on, Bendell, take a peek at the mess up there in the mango branches.” Claude stepped out of the way.

  “I don’t know what your game is.”

  “At this point, I’m trying to save a life.” Claude swept his hand to the aluminum stepladder.

  Marcus hesitated a moment, suspicious, but wavering.

  “What? You think I’m going to tip the ladder over, I’m going to pull some silly prank on you?”

  Marcus came over, touched the edge of the ladder with an experimental fingertip, looking back at Claude and working up some badass in his eyes, dropping the club as he started up, going two rungs, then three, his head coming close to the lower branches of the mango tree.

  Marcus felt the slime on his hands and held up his right palm, puzzled.

  “Up there to your left. Pull that branch to the side, you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

  As Marcus reached for the branch, Claude pulled his yellow insulated gloves from his pocket, put them on, and stooped for the jumper cables. “See what I’m telling you?”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “You’re looking in the wrong direction.”

  “Where?”

  “Try down here, peckerhead.”

  Marcus looked over his shoulder as Claude moved the clamps to the ladder, smiling up at the kid, enjoying this. Most fun he’d had in a while.

  “You fucker. What’re you doing?”

  “I see you’re packing your car, you and your girl are going to split.”

  “What do you care what I do?”

  “Oh, I care.”

  “Who are you?” The kid was looking around for a clear path to jump, but the branches blocked him on every side.

  “You took the feds’ offer, got out of jail free, now you’re sneaking off without completing your side of the bargain.”

  “You’re with the feds?”

  “Something like that.”

  Claude squeezed open the jaws of the clamps, moved toward the ladder.

  “Wait, wait. I can give you something. We can deal. Just let me down.”

  “Yeah? What the hell could you give me, turd ball?”

  “There’s somebody else.”

  Claude held the jumper cables close to the ladder. He could feel the throb of voltage. “What’s that mean, somebody else?”

  “Out on Prince Key. Somebody you don’t know about.”

  “Another snitch?”

  “That’s right. Let me down, I’ll tell you everything.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “He’s got a cell phone, he’s hidden it out there on the island. He calls some guy he knows at the FBI. Now let me go.”

  “You’re a fucking liar.”

  “It’s the truth. I swear.”

  “What’s his name, this snitch? Which one is it?”

  Bendell’s mouth was half-open, face slack. “You’ll let me down?”

  “Sure, kid. Tell me the fucker’s name and you’re free to go.”

  “Put those things away. Come on, man. Don’t do that.”

  “What’s his name, this other spy? You’re two seconds from going dark.”

  “The FBI guy he calls, his name is Sheffield. Frank, I think.”

  “And the spy’s name?”

  “I caught him talking on his phone and he admitted it. That’s why I’m bailing. This whole thing is fucked. The FBI is gonna crash the party big-time.”

  “Who is it? Who was talking to the feds? His name, goddamn it.”

  “I’m coming down now.”

  “Not until I have a name.”

  Bendell lurched, tried to shove the branches aside and jump. But, fuck that, Claude was too quick. He clamped one end of the jumper cable high up on one side of the ladder, the other clamp on the op
posite side.

  Some people had the wrong idea about aluminum. They thought it didn’t conduct electricity. But, no, aluminum was more conductive than copper compared by unit weight. True, it did tend to create an electrically resistive oxide inside certain connections, which could lead to heat cycling. Still, all in all, it was one of the most common metals used in high-voltage transmission lines, along with steel for reinforcement.

  Up on the backyard pole the transformer flashed blue like a giant lightbulb exploding, and Marcus Bendell and his ponytail turned into a galvanic smoke bomb.

  Not a pretty sight. His hands clutching the ladder, unable to let go, the current gripping him in place while his body bucked, and Claude guessed the kid’s internal organs were already starting to melt. The kid had turned into a giant human resistor making the amps skyrocket, the voltage trying to flow, all of it mingling in a perfect brew to poach Marcus from the inside out.

  The young man was completing the circuit, helping the sizzle of current find its way to the ground the way all electricity ultimately wanted. A simple wish, to return to the earth. Everyone completed that circuit sooner or later.

  In another two seconds, Bendell’s body broke loose from the aluminum and blew backward from the ladder in a dark, gagging cloud. The kid was dead quicker than if he’d taken a gunshot to the temple.

  Claude stepped around the smoking remains and unclipped the cables from the ladder and dropped them in the grass. At this moment a light would be blinking on a control panel at the west Miami substation. In a few minutes phone calls from the neighbors would start coming in. They heard a loud pop. Their lights went off, TVs shut down, toaster won’t work.

  Tomorrow there’d be a news story in The Miami Herald, a kid tapping into the power line died while trying to save himself a few bucks. The bad economy was driving people to take terrible risks. So let this be a lesson to all those citizens contemplating current diversion.

  Not that anyone read the paper anymore or took it seriously if they did.

  Claude left the ladder behind, just a generic Ace Hardware brand, and was back in the van and on his way in thirty seconds.

  Waiting at the first stoplight, he bent his head to the side and sniffed at the fumes clinging to his jumpsuit. Not the worst smell he’d ever inhaled.

  But close.

  SIX

  JUST AFTER DAWN THURSDAY MORNING, Thorn started the Evinrude and let it idle while he put away the tubes of caulk and the pipe wrench he’d been using on the cistern repair yesterday.

  Stowing them in the toolshed, he spotted an ancient pry bar hanging from a nail on the far wall. He took it down and weighed it in one hand, then tapped it hard against his open palm. It made a satisfying thunk.

  He carried it to the dock and stepped down into the skiff and set the pry bar on the console. You never knew when you might need to force a locked door, a sticky window, or maybe whack someone across the face with a pound of rusty steel. A guy the size of Prince might require two whacks.

  Back inside the house his Smith .357 was wrapped in an oily rag and stashed in a back closet. But Thorn decided against taking it. That pistol had saved his life more than once. But a handgun had a way of causing unintended consequences, upping the ante at crisis moments. He was weary of unintended consequences and even more weary of crisis moments. The pry bar would do.

  Thorn was moving with controlled focus. Ignoring the shudder in his nerves. He tried to tell himself that Flynn was not in any danger. There was no conspiracy here, no sinister intrigue. Flynn had gotten mixed up with Prince for reasons having nothing to do with Leslie Levine or her suspicious death. Prince had been creeping around his property for some entirely innocent purpose. Maybe he was only checking out the cistern like he said.

  But damn it, as hard as he tried to explain it away, he couldn’t ignore the weird overlap, coincidental connections that felt far from coincidental.

  The Princes were old-guard Miamians. For decades the patriarch, Reginald Prince, had published the afternoon newspaper in Miami, battling righteously against political corruption and criminal enterprises of every stripe. When Reginald died, his son, Reggie, let the paper flounder. He hadn’t inherited the father’s warrior gene. In the fifties, Reggie married a Havana-born nightclub singer and turned Prince Key into a weekend retreat for his wife’s musician friends and for writers and artists and movie stars passing through town.

  Growing up, Thorn heard stories about boozy orgies and high-stakes poker, congressmen and local leaders consorting with notorious actresses and mafiosi out on that island. Eventually Reggie and his wife abandoned the island for the mainland and faded from view. Then a few years back Reggie was arrested for bribing three Miami councilmen over a real estate deal. In only two generations the family had gone from crusading newsman to low-life scum.

  As a teenager, Thorn was drawn to Prince Key by its shadowy history and romance. But the day he boated there and poked around the place, he found only the charred remnants of a few wooden structures, piles of litter, and dark clouds of voracious mosquitoes, and not a whiff of romance anywhere.

  Now he stepped aboard, cast off the lines, and idled into the center of the lagoon, then headed out the narrow channel. As he reached open water, he hit the throttle hard, kicking the skiff onto plane.

  He kept his eyes on the silky bay before him. He was hungover from a night of fever dreams, a rising dread about Flynn. He kept circling back to that hurried message Flynn had left on his answering machine. The more Thorn replayed it, the more worrisome it seemed.

  Through the long night hours, Thorn passed in and out of sleep, debating whether to get involved or stay put, tormented by a flurry of scenes of past events when he’d answered some call and things had gone badly. Flynn’s face mingling with so many others, people Thorn had known, men and women, some long dead, those he’d tried to help and wound up failing, and some he’d managed to comfort or save. Snippets of fistfights and gunfire, flashes of knife blades, jerked him back to full consciousness.

  Thorn’s skiff sliced across the oily, flat waters, and stingrays scooted out of his path, and schools of mullet parted before him. The mirrored water reflected his white hull, his own stiff body rippling at the wheel, his hair blowing, a silvery-blue replica of himself. He kept his eyes forward. Let the wind rip away all doubts. Almost all.

  He tried to push Flynn away, concentrate on his surroundings as he flew north along the eastern shore of Key Largo, a half mile off, five feet of green water. No boaters out, too early in the day for the summer tourists, no dive boats heading to the reefs to view the sad remains of the elkhorn coral, the dying, whitening twists of living rock. A mile to his east a lone shrimper was returning with his catch.

  He skimmed by the state-owned lands preserved for the moment against bulldozers and chain saws, at least until some weasel-eyed politician found the temptation too irresistible, found a loophole, found enough willing officials to overturn the protections and flout the will of the people and send in the machines.

  It would happen, it always happened, it was happening before Thorn was born and would be happening into the future until all of it was wiped away. The wild tangles of native scrub and gumbo-limbos and sapodillas and mangroves along the coastline, all of it densely populated with every manner of varmint, possums and egrets and endangered rodents and butterflies.

  Then he came to Ocean Reef Club, the ritzy outpost for bankers, brokers, and assorted money changers who descended for a week or two in winter to luxuriate in their oceanfront mansions.

  After Ocean Reef, the terrain turned wild again, and Thorn spotted his turn and cut sharply into Pumpkin Creek, then took a straight shot north, still at full throttle, faster than he needed to go, faster than was safe in such a tight channel, flying around the blind bends in the creek, gritting his teeth, unable to slow down, his wake splashing white foam high into the lower branches of the mangroves, Thorn keeping the engine wide open to match his pulse, his own racing mind. The closer he
got to the south end of Prince Key, the stronger the magnetic pull.

  Banking hard into Angelfish Creek, the broad river that separated the tip of North Key Largo from the rest of the ragged keys that trickled north for miles into Biscayne Bay, he swung the skiff into a sharp, sliding left at Linderman Creek and cut out into open bay, circling Prince Key to see if anything had changed since his last pass, and, no, it was still shrouded by an impenetrable mass of foliage and mangroves whose roots ran down to the waterline, an island whose dock had long ago washed away and had not been replaced, only a few rotting pilings left, and not even a spit of sand or any beachhead, nowhere to make a landing, which left only the one entrance Thorn remembered from long ago. If it still existed.

  He completed the circuit, then ducked back in Angelfish Creek, pushing down the waterway into a labyrinth of smaller arteries, each one tapering narrower and narrower. He flashed past a warning sign, NO MOTORIZED WATERCRAFT, the sign the Park Service had been posting throughout the back bays of the Everglades these last few years, putting off-limits many of Thorn’s familiar haunts, all his best fishing areas, and Thorn grudgingly obeyed the signs, honored the state’s attempts at preservation, but not this time, forging on, the branches scratching at the hull of Thorn’s boat, slapping his arms, clawing his face, and then came more signs, hand-drawn private warnings, NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, scrawled in red, another saying, TURN BACK, NO ENTRY, nailed to a stake, and ARMED RESPONSE—NO WARNING SHOT, but he didn’t slow, pushing on until he entered some nameless tributary, a waterway he thought he recognized from years before when he was young and determined to poke into every corner of the watery world within the range of his gas tank, back in the days when Thorn needed to stretch his tether farther and farther from his island home, in search of some secret place, some knowledge hidden beyond the horizon, back in those years when he still believed such secret places existed.

  As he slid around a sharp turn and entered a widening basin, he saw the hidden beach he remembered. An arc of white sand that glowed in the early-morning shadows like the sliver of a new moon against a dusky sky.